In Girling, her open-hearted debut collection, Eve Esfandiary-Denney wrestles with the boundaries between living and death, history and the present, and how these are preordained for us in the fabric of our DNA and in our geographical or cultural environments. Through a personal relationship with illness and a closeness to death, the author asks the reader, ‘I hope it’s ok to die. I can / be something / like actualized metaphor.’ She recounts the story of a father left abandoned in a church, and remembers a grandmother’s home in a traveller’s caravan. Grief is portrayed with a tongue in cheek, cosmic register, as the speaker invests in ‘lions’ mane’, attempts to feel ‘super-radiant’, and moves into ‘moon pose’, while we watch electronic deep-sea claws on YouTube, and google what to do if your mum died last night. Philosophical, funny, pertinent, ecological, global and intimate, this is a collection of poems for the contemporary moment, a book deeply personal yet communal in its intention, beginning from a personal history then resonating outwards, ending on a note so gorgeously hopeful, as ‘life’ moves towards the speaker, ‘gloriously close’.
‘Girling glides through death, pain, surprise and survival to arrive at the most gorgeous and hopeful principle for living. The sensation of not-knowing, or of being suspended in-between, becomes an opportunity to be more permeable, more open to the synchronicities and oddities of the world. This collection is mesmeric, elemental, luminous, but time spent with Eve’s writing also feels like the most intimate and generative conversations, the moments between friends that can alter the day’s shape.’
— Brodie Crellin, author of A Sense of Occasion
